When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, at first the world scoffed as Russia remained dependent on western technology for 95% of the electronics needed to make its vaunted missiles.

The technology sanctions were quickly rolled out in the hope of decimating the Armed Forces of Russia (AFR) ability to make weapons, but the ridicule soon turned to frustration as the Kremlin found work arounds that kept the tech flowing. Amongst other things, Russia began to buy and cannibalise washing machines for their advanced microchips, which was held up as an example of the success of the sanctions.

Four years on, and everything has changed. A reconnaissance drone recovered from the Ukrainian battlefield last year was built almost entirely from Chinese components — navigation modules, flight controllers, antenna systems, autopilot chips — sourced not from the black market or sanctions dodges, but on order from a single Chinese manufacturer whose products are listed openly on AliExpress. Russia no longer needs Western washing machines. It has China.

Chinese tech has come on by leaps and bounds in the last few years. The Biden administration’s attempt to cut China off from the US’ best technology with the CHIPS law backfired spectacularly, causing the sector to consolidate and innovate to an extent where China is now overtaking the US in sector after sector, according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 2024.

And thanks to the Iran war it has customers from the Global South beating down its door. According to a report by Ember, the majority of the world’s emerging markets have raised their purchases of Chinese technology by between 300% and 500% since the start of Operation Epic Fury, starting with, but not limited to, green energy technology.

“Fifty countries set all-time records for Chinese solar imports in March 2026, with a further 60 seeing the highest levels in six months,” said Ember, a global energy consultancy.

The rise of solar power equipment was particularly strong in Asia and Africa: India (141%), Malaysia (384%), Lao PDR (108%), Nigeria (519%), Kenya (207%), and Ethiopia (391%).

Green tech and the rapid development of EVs are the most obvious examples. But the most shocking is China's rapid progress in the production of microchips and AI, especially the roll out of DeepSeek, which is as good as anything the US has produced but was developed at a fraction of the cost. A reported $5.6mn was spent on its training using a mere 2,000 constrained Nvidia chips. Forced to work with constrained hardware, Chinese researchers developed algorithmic and architectural efficiencies that Western labs, flush with computers, had little incentive to discover.

The drone war: from washing machines to all-Chinese components

The story is similar with microchips. On the frontlines in Ukraine its intelligence services have been tracking the evolution of Russia’s drone technology with increasing alarm.

As IntelliNews reported and Ukrainian intelligence sources cited by NV and Reuters, China is covertly supplying Russia with a new generation of decoy drones built using entirely Chinese technology — the first documented instance of a Russian battlefield system with no Western components at all. One was composed almost entirely of components from a single company, CUAV Technology Co., including a flight controller with autopilot, navigation modules, antennas and an airspeed sensor. A similar story has also played out in the Iran war, where drones that used the US-controlled GPS system for guidance last year in the 12-day war with Israel, have switched to China’s BeiDou satellite navigation system that negates Israel’s electronic warfare (EW) countermeasures and improves their accuracy to devastating effect.

"In 2023, the Russian Federation presented a vertical take-off UAV of allegedly its own design, which turned out to be a CUAV Technology product available on AliExpress… All components and blocks in the new drones are of Chinese origin," stated the GUR's War & Sanctions project. "This is a new method," it added, describing it as evidence of China's evolving role in supporting Russia's war effort through dual-use exports.

The drone engines flowing to Russia's Kupol state manufacturer have also been shipped through front companies, labelled as "industrial refrigeration units," according to Reuters, citing European security agency sources. Those engines have enabled Kupol to ramp up production of the Garpiya-A1 attack drone to a target of 6,000 units last year, up from 2,000 in 2024. Ukraine's Main Intelligence Directorate has separately stated that 60 to 65% of electronic components in the Shahed drones used daily against Ukrainian territory are now Chinese-made.

The patent race: a scissors effect

China has officially surpassed the US in overall research and development spending, investing about $1.03 trillion in technological advancement last year. 

The breadth of China's technological advance is captured most clearly in the global patent data. In 2025, global PCT patent applications reached 275,900 filings, with China leading at 73,718 applications — 40% more than the US' 52,617, Statista reported.

The number of Chinese patent applications continues to rise while the US has declined for four consecutive years. This scissors-effect, analysts say, is the most strategically significant signal in today's global patent landscape, according to the Davis Center.

In 2024, the World Intellectual Property Organization recorded 3.7mn patent applications globally — a record. China's national patent office received 1.8mn applications, nearly four times the US' 501,831.

In clean energy specifically, China has increased its share of global clean energy patents from approximately 5% to over 75% since 2000, filing more than twice as many high-quality patents as the US.

China broke into the top ten of WIPO's Global Innovation Index for the first time in 2025, the only middle-income economy in the top 30. Its research output grew 14% and now accounts for 26% of all published scientific papers globally. The Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou cluster ranked first globally for innovation intensity, ahead of Silicon Valley.

And the range of sectors is becoming increasingly broad. Amongst other recent innovations is China’s push to develop a sodium-ion battery that could revolutionise grid-level power storage, the world's first fourth-generation melt-down proof nuclear reactor using “pebble technology” and it even claims to have built the world’s first commercially viable nuclear fusion reactor.

But it is with microchips that the impact could be biggest. China has developed its first seven nanometre chip for use in phones in 2023 with Huawei’s Mate 60 Pro, almost closing the entire gap with the best US chips. The achievement remains one generation behind the global leaders and reportedly remains difficult to scale, so it represents a strategic milestone rather than full technological parity with the US. But US experts were caught out, believing that China was still years away from getting chips as small as 7 nanometres.

In March 2025, researchers at Peking University announced they had used new materials to shatter chip performance limits, developing a 2D transistor that operates 40% faster than Taiwan’s TSMC's (NYSE: TSM) 3-nanometre devices while consuming 10% less energy — a potential "change lanes" moment in the semiconductor race that bypasses silicon-based roadblocks entirely.

The robot race: China competes against itself

Robots is another area where China is streaking ahead. China installed a record 295,000 industrial robots in 2024, according to the International Federation of Robotics — representing half (54%) of global deployments and exceeding the combined total of every other country in the world. The US installed 34,200 — down 9%. Europe installed 85,000 — down 8%.

China's operational stock of industrial robots exceeded 2mn units in 2024 — the first country ever to reach that milestone, and nearly half of the global total of 4.66mn units. For the first time, Chinese robot manufacturers sold more units domestically than foreign suppliers, with their market share rising to 57% in 2024, up from just 28% a decade ago.

The combination — world's largest clean energy manufacturer, world's largest industrial robotics installer and builder, world's largest patent filer, world's most advanced AI models produced on constrained hardware — represents a technological capability profile that the US' sanctions strategy was designed to prevent.

The evidence from the Ukrainian battlefield to the solar import surge in Lagos and Nairobi suggests that strategy has not merely failed. It may have accelerated the very outcome it sought to forestall.

Science fiction is starting to become reality. Like a scene out of Bladerunner China is currently rolling out a plan to develop a “low-altitude economy” where groceries are delivered to your door by drone and workers can avoid the rush hour by taking a flying taxi to work.

The initiative gained official backing in July 2023, when the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party endorsed a nationwide effort to develop low-altitude flight services in what it anticipates will become a $280bn business as soon as 2030.

The US monopoly on the highest of high-tech has been broken. While the US, with partners like TMSC in Taiwan, remains in the lead, China has almost closed the gap in some of the most difficult to do tech spheres and is already overtaken the US, and is pulling ahead, in other more mundane technologies. And with the growing belligerence and unpredictability of the US supplies, the Global South in particular is breathing a sign of relief as they have somewhere else to buy and chips, cars and solar panels they need to power their development.